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NEWS
Lives of Wesleyan Student and Her Stalker Collide
May 8, 2009

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
She was a disciplined, fearless young woman of great promise, a Wesleyan University junior with a passion for women’s health issues. He was apparently disturbed, a man with shaky relationships and a malevolence toward Jews, threatening them and others on the campus in Middletown, Conn., in a journal he kept.

The lives of Johanna Justin-Jinich, 21, and Stephen P. Morgan, 29, had intersected briefly — and ominously — two years ago, when both attended a summer course at New York University. He called repeatedly and sent 38 harassing e-mail messages. The university and the police were notified, but he had left town and she declined to press charges.

There was no way to foresee the sudden, nightmarish sequel. Mr. Morgan walked into a campus bookstore about 1 p.m. Wednesday, then toward the Red and Black Cafe, where Ms. Justin-Jinich worked. He was a bearded, menacing figure on the overhead surveillance camera, a dark gun in his right hand swinging at his side, and something else hidden behind him in his left hand.

It was a long-stranded wig and he put it on, the baldish man undergoing a bizarre transformation as he confronted her, raised the gun and opened fire, a point-blank, seven-shot execution, officials said. Ms. Justin-Jinich fell, mortally wounded. The assailant — who the authorities said turned himself in to the police just before 9:15 p.m. Thursday — retreated the way he came in, dropping his wig, long-sleeved shirt and Czech-made CZ-USA 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol.

Outside, he did not run away immediately. He milled around with students as police cars and an ambulance converged on the tumultuous scene. Checking witnesses, one officer asked for his name and phone number in case the police needed to contact him later, but let him go, The Hartford Courant reported.

It was not until hours later, after Ms. Justin-Jinich had been pronounced dead at Middlesex Hospital and investigators had heard Mr. Morgan’s name from the victim’s family as a possible suspect, that the police realized that they had stopped him outside the bookstore, the newspaper reported. It was unclear if he had stayed to watch the chaos or could not escape quickly because his car was blocked by emergency vehicles.

In any case, Mr. Morgan apparently just walked away, leaving his car, with Colorado license plates, in the bookstore parking lot.

In Mr. Morgan’s notebook journal, found with his laptop in the basement of the bookstore, the police later discovered what may have been an even more diabolical plot — to rape and kill Ms. Justin-Jinich and then go on a shooting spree on the Wesleyan campus.

The authorities said that Mr. Morgan turned himself in to the Meriden Police Department without incident on Thursday night, and was then turned over to the Middletown police. He was being held on $10 million bond and was to appear in Middletown Superior Court on Friday morning, the police said.

Sonia Rodriguez, a clerk at a Cumberland Farms convenience store in Meriden, said Mr. Morgan walked into the store about 9:15 p.m. She said he looked down at a stack of newspapers, saw a photo of himself and asked for a pay phone. Ms. Rodriguez, who said she did not recognize Mr. Morgan, asked if he needed help, and he said he wanted to call the police.

When officers arrived, she said, “they threw him on the ground. I got nervous. I started crying. I was very, very scared.”

Mr. Morgan had been the object of a nationwide alert with a $10,000 reward and a manhunt that focused on Middletown, a community of 48,000 in central Connecticut. Investigators said they believed that he had driven to Middletown from Boulder, Colo., arriving a day before the shooting and staying in a local hotel.

As family, friends and the Wesleyan community mourned the slain woman and investigators sought to unveil the motivations and recent movements of the fugitive, the authorities in Middletown warned of a dangerous and possibly armed man on the loose, and urged university officials and Jewish residents of Middletown to take precautions.

Wesleyan, a private liberal arts school with about 3,000 students, went into lockdown. All classes had been finished for the year by Tuesday and students were studying for finals. The campus was all but deserted.

At the behest of Mayor Sebastian Giuliano and Police Chief Lynn M. Baldoni, Congregation Adath Israel, a Conservative Jewish congregation and Middletown’s only synagogue, located a block from the bookstore, was closed on Thursday. Its president, Eliot Meadow, said congregants were considering holding Sabbath services at another location or just hiring extra security. The Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford distributed pictures of Mr. Morgan to member organizations and asked them to be vigilant.

As the investigation unfolded, the police focused on the only known point of connection between the victim and the assailant. It was a six-week summer program, in June and July 2007, at New York University, called Sexual Diversity in Society. Poulami Roychowdhury, a graduate student, taught the course, which met for two hours three days a week in a campus building in Greenwich Village.

Ms. Roychowdhury said she barely recalled Mr. Morgan, who did not participate in discussions and eventually dropped out. But she remembered Ms. Justin-Jinich, who was 19 at the time. “She was always participating and she received an A-minus in the class,” she said, writing her final paper on lesbian identity in modern society.

The two lived in student housing, but not in the same residence hall, said John Beckman, an N.Y.U. spokesman. On July 17, as the program was nearing its end, Ms. Justin-Jinich notified the university that she had received repeated harassing e-mail messages and phone calls from Mr. Morgan. The school notified the police, and officers spoke with her. The case was referred to detectives.

The police report told of 38 e-mail messages that were “insulting” and “unwanted.” It quoted one as saying, “You’re going to have a lot more problems down the road if you can’t take any criticism, Johanna,” using an expletive. But she declined to file charges, and the matter was dropped.

Ms. Justin-Jinich was from Timnath, Colo., a town of 200 southeast of Fort Collins. Because Mr. Morgan has lived in Colorado communities, including Colorado Springs and Boulder, the police were trying to determine if he and Ms. Justin-Jinich knew each other in Colorado.

Amid an outpouring of sympathy and praise for the victim, the portrait of a kind, thoughtful and talented woman began to emerge. Though her family was Jewish, Justin Bours, who shared an apartment with her this semester at Wesleyan, said she regarded herself as an agnostic, and was politically liberal.

She attended a Quaker boarding-preparatory school, the Westtown School. John Baird, headmaster of the school, which was founded by the Quakers in 1799 in rural southeastern Pennsylvania, said Ms. Justin-Jinich enrolled in 2002 and graduated in 2006. She lived in Mexico as part of an exchange program in her junior year. Her mother, Ingrid, also graduated from Westtown, in 1971, as did her uncle Eric, the headmaster said.

“Johanna was respected for her original thinking and willingness to delve deeply into a variety of subjects,” Mr. Baird said.

At Wesleyan, where she enrolled in 2006, Ms. Justin-Jinich was described by friends as intellectual and passionate about her studies, pursuing a double major, one in Iberian studies and an interdisciplinary major in history, philosophy and literature. She quoted Nietzsche, Epicurus and Rousseau, and was a fan of the Chilean writer-politician Pablo Neruda and the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti Merello, they said. One friend said her summer plans included an internship in Washington with an organization focusing on women’s issues.

“She had planned to pursue a life of helping people, which was true to her personality and character,” said Leah Lucid, a close friend who was to have roomed with her next semester.

A day after the shooting, there were large gaps in the background of the assailant, who until February had an address in Swampscott, Mass. His parents, James F. Morgan, 72, and Maureen Morgan, 69, live nearby in Marblehead, Mass.

James Morgan is a retired venture capitalist and graduate of Harvard Business School, who once taught there. In recent years, he has been active in the International Federation for Family Development, which provides education and support for parents.

Hours before Mr. Morgan’s surrender, his sister Diana told reporters outside the family home that they did not know where he was or where he might go. She urged him: “Turn yourself in right now to avoid any law enforcement agency, wherever you are, to avoid any further bloodshed. We love you, we will support you in every way, and we don’t want anyone else to get hurt.”

Greg Morgan, a brother, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying his family was distraught over the shooting, and had not spoken to Stephen for several weeks. He said his brother had not exhibited signs of anti-Semitism in the past.

The police said he did not appear to have a criminal history. Public records indicate that he lived in Fairfax County, Va., in 2000, and was in Honolulu from September 2000 to February 2001. In March 2001, one record showed a military address aboard the Navy guided missile cruiser Lake Erie. But the Navy said it had no record of him.

From 2002 to 2007, he lived in various places in Colorado Springs and Boulder. Justin Flowers, a man who bought a $200,000 home from Mr. Morgan in Colorado Springs in 2005, said Mr. Morgan sold the house because he had broken up with a fiancée about whom he talked constantly.

“He seemed like he had way too much on his mind, a whole lot of pain inside of him,” Mr. Flowers said. He said he never detected anti-Semitism in Mr. Morgan, but added that he refused to sell his house to a Vietnamese family because he “didn’t like Vietnamese people.”

In Colorado Springs, Ed Shvartzman, who rented an apartment to Mr. Morgan, said he was “full of anger, kind of maybe withholding emotion.”

Reporting was contributed by Al Baker, Marc Beja, Alison Leigh Cowan, Winnie Hu, Serge F. Kovaleski, Trymaine Lee, William K. Rashbaum and Liz Robbins in New York; Lisa W. Foderaro and Nate Schweber in Middletown, Conn.; Ariana Green in Marblehead, Mass.; Martin Forstenzer and Dan Frosch in Colorado; and David Kocieniewski in West Chester, Pa.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 12, 2009
An article on Friday about the intersecting lives of Johanna Justin-Jinich, a Wesleyan University student fatally shot inside a campus bookstore, and Stephen P. Morgan, the man accused of killing her, included an erroneous location from a city official for the discovery of a computer belonging to Mr. Morgan, and misstated the location where his journal, which contained threats to Ms. Justin-Jinich and others, was found by the police. Both items were found in the basement of the bookstore — not in Mr. Morgan’s car, which was parked outside.